Humble ISD receives their report card from the state

Published 9:13 am, Monday, February 24, 2014

As many educators and school administrators knew beforehand, there would be several changes in regards to accountability and how school districts are rated through the Texas Education Agency.

The annual report, which is like a report card for the Humble Independent School District, includes a section previously known as the Academic Excellence Indicator System that is now called the Texas Academic Performance Reports.

Humble ISD and all of their campuses received the “met standard” rating through TEA. This is great since there were only two ratings assigned this year which are “met standard” or “improvement needed.”

“Last year, we had 4,559 staff members which includes 68.5 percent that are teachers, support staff and those who work directly with the students,” said Carol Atwood, assistant superintendent for data quality, accountability and evaluation and research, during a presentation at the Humble ISD February meeting. “The district values for residential and commercial where we derive our taxable income from is pretty stable at 80 percent for residential and a little over 16 percent for business.”

The data through the TAPR shows that Humble ISD continues to grow and the demographics continue to shift as well.

The TAPR contains most of the academic information for Humble ISD which lets the administrators and board members know how well they are doing and what areas they need to improve. The report also includes data from the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness tests students must take.

The district attendance rate for 2011-2012 as reported on the 2012-2013 TAPR indicated that the district rate of 96 percent was slightly better than the state rate at 95.9 percent and equal to the regional rate 96 percent.

A total of 2,446 Humble ISD graduates from the class of 2011 are included in the report. Of these graduates, 24 percent attended four-year public universities in Texas, 38 percent attended two-year public colleges in Texas and three percent attended Texas private colleges and universities.

Additionally, the evaluation of meeting the STAAR for students summed across all grades indicated that the district exceeded the state and region performance in all five content areas Reading, Writing, Social Studies, Mathematics and Science.

There are four indexes the district is rated upon including Index One that is focused on student achievement, Index Two which is student progress, Index Three is closing the performance gaps and Index Four is post-secondary readiness.

“This system includes so many more data pieces and slices of information that allows for them to paint a more accurate snapshot of how the district is performing,” Atwood said.

Additionally, there is one component of House Bill 5 that requires the district and every school to report on student and community engagement. They must evaluate the engagement between the student and community and assign a rating such as “exemplary,” “recognized,” “acceptable” and “unacceptable.”

There are nine areas they must look at that include fine arts, wellness and physical education, community involvement, workforce development, language composition, digital learning, drop-out prevention, gifted and talented and compliance.

The district has developed an oversight committee who found the people who consist of parents, residents, business owners and educators to gather all of the data and submit their findings by July.